1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image volume segmentation, and more particularly to a system and method for image volume segmentation using surfaces given a boundary.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Variations of the intelligent scissors method find the minimal (1D) surface on a 2D weighted graph, given user-indicated pieces of the boundary. This algorithm has been very popular in both the research community and commercially due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Although several attempts have been made to extend the approach to 3D volume segmentation, all of them have so far have had serious problems with sampling or object topology. A new method of exactly extending the popular intelligent scissors algorithm to 3D has been published. Although this new method overcomes the problems of previous methods, it is computationally slow.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for image volume segmentation.